The 20th century's dependence on the motorized vehicle has become the 21st century's transportation engineering challenge framed by broadly defined cost mitigation. Generally, it is felt that things can be done in a much better way in jammed urban cores and on suburban roads and highways, but daunting mass-scale adoption issues along with old fashioned inertia and investment caution still rule the day.
The rapid adoption of global positioning system (GPS) technology within moving vehicles ranks up there with some of the most profound recent changes in transportation. Businesses and consumers alike are now well aware of the advantages of knowing where they are. Price points of GPS are coming down and the general precision and reliability continue to improve, but market demand for better and cheaper approaches for simply locating vehicles puts constant strain on the 1970's era model of GPS. For the purposes of this disclosure, this may be referred to as the “location awareness pull”.
Transportation infrastructures have likewise witnessed a relatively rapid adoption of automated methods and technologies, most noticeable to the public in traffic flow coordination through traffic lights. The agenda and burgeoning of the annual World Congress of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), reflecting a wide range of global innovation, shows that there is a great deal more to it than automated and advanced traffic lights. For the purposes of this disclosure, this may be referred to as the “ITS thrust”.
Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) and the community surrounding its development generally encapsulate the growing trend toward having vehicles simply communicate between each other and the transportation infrastructure. The list of applications for this communication is broad and overlaps quite a bit with the ITS application list. For the purposes of this disclosure, this effort may be referred to as the “DSRC thrust”.
Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) and the National VII Coalition is a relatively recent technical and community synthesis effort aimed at coalescing many of these powerful macro-development trends in the 21st century transportation industry. The general notion is that vehicles and the infrastructure need to become coordinated and develop together as an overall system.
Focusing on traffic flow management specifically, and traffic light management even more specifically, magnetic loop sensing built into roadways has long been used, among other raw-data sources, for real-time intelligence on traffic light switching. Other forms of sensors, including cameras and sensors tuned specifically to emergency response vehicles also have been deployed. A recent example in this area is the company Aldis Inc., which is commercially releasing its “GridSmart” line of intersection-based fisheye cameras intended to much better understand traffic flows in and around intersections (e.g., better than magnetic loops). Loops, cameras and other forms of sensors have the distinct advantage that they simply work, while it is their cost structures that currently place extreme limits on any exponential expansion on their deployments. They also suffer from inherent passivity, in that pro-active communications between participants is not generally possible, or at least not practical and cost effective.
The need for more sources of real-time data is clearly coming into focus as a barrier to achieving the grander visions of the transportation community. A range of academic, governmental and commercial efforts are accordingly focused on this raw-data requirement.